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Language, the key is to solve our huge advantage in knowledge and technology. Other animal species transmission of a large number of technical know-how nongenetically from parent to offspring, but not language, the lessons to be learned, rather than simple preferences. And the ban did not elaborate system of the hard-earned skills and patience to data collection. It has taken thousands of years our species to the communication and investigation to begin the search for the identity of our own key.           Man, the Speaking Animal     We are animals. Are we just animals? The ideological tug-of-war over “human exceptionalism” can be damped, if not stopped outright, by emphasizing a few uncontroversial facts. Sight, the capacity to extract huge amounts of relevant information from a relatively safe distance, was an innovation that multiplied the opportunities of intelligent behavior: locomotion, predation, evasion, migration, and so on. Sight and flight have each evolved numerous times, but language has evolved just once, so far as we know—in our genus. (Neanderthals may have been a second talking species for a while.) Language is the key to our huge advantage in knowledge and technology. Other animal species transmit significant amounts of know-how nongenetically from parent to offspring, but without language, the lessons to be learned are rather simple preferences and prohibitions, not elaborate systems of hard-won technique and patiently gathered data.   It has taken our species thousands of years of communication and investigation to begin to find the keys to our own identities. Our newfound capacity for long-distance knowledge gives us powers that dwarf those of all the rest of the life on Earth. It has been estimated that ten thousand years ago, the human population comprised a small fraction of 1 percent of the mass of vertebrate life on land; today, we, together with our livestock and pets, make up about 98 percent of that total. We exploit an ever increasing share of the planet’s resources, but we do offer something in return. Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future — an asteroid on a collision course, or global warming — and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us. We are responsible for the future of life on the planet, in a way no other species could ever be.              —Daniel Dennett, How Has Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection Transformed Our View of Humanity's Place in the Universe, in Life - The Science of Biology.             Indexes/05